The Writings of CCF

"MY UNIQUE BROTHER: FRANCIS BEATTY FISHBURNE, Jr."
by Charles Carroll Fishburne, Sr.

There were three kids in our family, all boys, I was the youngest and my unique brother was four years ahead of me. Our No. 1 brother, Bellinger, was ten years ahead of him, so Francis and I hardly considered him to be in our generation. Our early days in Columbia, SC afforded many good times.

Everyone is unique, I guess, but some are more so than the rest of us. Such a one was Francis B. Fishburne, Jr. Although we always called him Francis at home, most folks who knew him called him Frank, so I'll use that name.

My earliest recollections of him are of a kid always busy, always inquisitive, always inspecting or, as he said, "seein'". An often-used question of our mother was "Francis, what are you doing?" and his standard answer was "I'm seein'"; Seein' what makes a gadget work, seein' how it comes apart, seein' why it makes a noise, seein' if it will break if it drops, etc., etc. Once when he was eight or nine, on a visit to our cousins - Bellinger and Louise Davis - we were shown a record player which had just been purchased. Later when mother checked on Frank, who had been alone with the player for an hour or so, she discovered to her horror that he had taken it apart. By the time she returned from breaking the sad story to our cousin, however, he had the machine reassembled and working.

Gadgets were not his only interest, however. Anything that moved, or sometimes that even stood still, was worth inquiry. Across the road from the dairy farm of the Greens', where we frequently visited, a farmer was plowing one day. This was a new operation for Frank, about eight years old at that time, so he got permission from mother to walk behind the farmer. Mother thought that walking a couple of rows across the big field would put him in the mode to take an afternoon nap with the rest of us. Not so! When she couldn't find him an hour or so later, she finally looked across the field and there he was; walking behind the horse, the plow, and the farmer, still talking and still asking questions.

A construction set was Frank’s prize toy. With this he could build all kinds of gadgets, sometimes letting me help. It was a 'Mechano' set, similar to the more popular 'Erector' brand, but superior we always thought.

Our family made frequent trips to the cotton farm of Uncle Roots and Aunt Carrie Davis, near Columbia. In season, Frank and I would climb the mulberry trees and feast on the berries. Once we noticed they had a grey look, which was not common, but that didn't stop our eating, that is until a close inspection revealed the grey color was caused by a layer of small bugs. We didn't get sick.

On the walls of Aunt Carrie's living room were many portraits of our uncle's and aunt's ancestors. We had no idea who they were, but when we had more time than we had interesting things to do, we used to identify them around the room as "This was Uncle Roots' papa, and this was Uncle Roots' papa's papa, and this was Uncle Roots' papa's papa's mama, and this was Uncle Roots' papa's papa's mama's papa, ... " and on and on. We didn't realize, of course, the value of those original oils.

Across the cotton field from Uncle Roots' home were other cousins whom we went to see, also. But in the hot summer - the South Carolina summer - the sand was too hot for bare feet to tolerate, so this put to the test the ingenuity of my brother. He figured out how to handle it; he would run across the sand a hundred feet or so, scrape away the hot top layer and stand on the cooler sand ‘til his feet cooled, then run and make another standing spot. Of course I followed him from one cool spot to the next.

Frank was interested in the different makes of cars, and I joined him in this, just as I followed him in many interests and pranks. We could identify most cars by their sound. For a while he delivered the three popular weekly magazines; Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, and the Country Gentleman, with my help, all around our neighborhood. After our father passed away in 1925, mother moved us to Asheville, NC.

Structures were fascinating to him around high school age. He knew the stats of every notable bridge, building, and dam in the world, and we modeled part of the Saint Lawrence River Bridge on our sleeping porch in Asheville. During construction, this massive bridge had two tremendous failures, both of which Frank had studied in detail.

This brother of mine almost became a distributor of a product called Magic Cheese Chips, which had been gloriously described in a magazine as the effortless path to great wealth. He deep-fried the raw chips, bagged them, and displayed them in stores. The trouble was nobody bought them, so we had them for snacks at home - like them or not - for quite a while.

One of his early ideas was to make candy by coating pieces of octagon soap with chocolate. I don't know how this prank got past our mother, but she found out about it rather quickly after a neighborhood girl ate some of it at a little party we had. The girl's stomach and her mother got very upset.

Near our home in West Asheville were several wooded areas, which afforded good playing and climbing. Somehow Frank lost his hold on a pine tree he had climbed about 25 feet, and down he came, snapping off limbs every few feet, and hit with a thud. Nothing was broken, tho’, because the ground was covered with a heavy layer of honeysuckle.

About high school time, Frank talked mother into buying our first radio - a small one to be sure. It gave us many hours of pleasure, and aquainted us with every sizeable transmitting station around the country. Lum and Abner was one of our favorite programs. He was fascinated by mechanical things, and once invested 35 cents of hard-earned money in a Popular Mechanics magazine. Mother was a bit disappointed in this purchase, since she had trouble sometimes putting the proper food on the table. I took the opportunity to give him a hard time about this "waste".

His ingenuity was called upon in an event, which could have been a disaster. A blind fellow had a very small - five foot wide - place where he sold candy, cookies, etc., near our home. Well, one night someone broke in the back door of the sad little shanty and stole some goods. Being a friend of the blind man, Frank felt that this should be stopped, and that it was his job to do it. He rigged a shotgun so that it could fire at the door if it was pried open, and probably would have taken off someone's head. Sure enough, a couple of nights later the crook tried it again. Fortunately the gun slipped slightly and fired at the top of the door. (I'm sure the fellow was still running when the sun came up) Somehow this operation, also, got past mother, at least until the smoke cleared away. What a far cry this type of 'security' is from today’s criminals’ rights philosophy.

Our mother's semi-invalid sister, another Aunt Carrie, operated a small store a mile or so from our home. Frank and I spent many hours working there when we would have rather been elsewhere. Usually several boxes of prize candy were available to the customers, mostly consisting of one cent pieces. If the buyer picked the right piece - determined by the color of the center when he bit into it - a prize was his also. One box had five-cent bars, wrapped, for purchase. Unwrapping the bar revealed if a prize was in order. Well, Ol' sharp-eyed Frank discovered that a certain mark on the bar wrapper also identified a winning bar. So we pooled our resources and bought all the prize-winning bars, and of course got all the prizes, leaving a box of relatively high-priced candy bars and no prizes. Needless to say, our aunt smelled a rat, and talked with mother about it. Of course we ended up pooling the rest of our resources and buying the rest of the overpriced bars.

At Aunt Carrie's there were two chores, which we could have done without. She was a firm believer in certain 'health' foods. One of these was carrot juice, which we had to prepare for her by grinding endless numbers of carrots, by hand of course. The other chore we despised was bringing up buckets of coal from the crawl space under the house. The coal was stored on the ground and it seemed we were always scratching in the dirt, trying to scoop up the last bit of coal dust, and getting more black dirt then coal.

Our senior high school was five miles from home by the most direct route. We could save five cents if we rode our bike there and back, instead of riding the bus. This we did quite often. Across the French Broad river was the steel "Carrier's" bridge, with it's structure overhead. Francis had what the steel industry calls "high-walking legs", referring to the ability to walk structures high above ground, having nothing to hold onto. With soft-soled shoes, he used to walk over the top chord of the bridge, nothing between him and the water but about fifty feet of thin air.

Somehow about high school time he invested $60.00 plus, of scarce money in the first geared bicycle seen on the Asheville streets, a Schwinn. It had a gearbox, which provided a better pedal-to-wheel ratio for climbing hills. For a short while, it stole the show around bicycle circles, but the attraction was short-lived because the fiber gears used couldn't take the punishment lively boys could dish out, and it spent much time in the repair shop. Finally the geared novelty was abandoned, and it was converted to a straight drive.

Bicycles were important to our family. Besides being our primary source of transportation, we delivered a lot of groceries with them, both for Teague's market and for our Aunt Carrie's little store. Teague's groceries were priced out of our range, but with their higher prices came phone ordering, charge accounts, and delivery, which were foreign features to us A & P customers. A friend of mine said that he bet his mom had bought Mr. Teague's thumb on the meat scale hundreds of times.

Although the subject choices in High School were scant in the early thirties, Frank was able to take basic drafting. From this, he landed a part-time job with a Scotch architect, S. Grant Alexander. Mr. Alexander was one of the last who required drawings to be drawn in pencil, and when corrected, redrawn in India ink. This made beautiful drawings, but expensive. Frank's work here was great training. His drawings were always excellent, as a draftsman and as an engineer.

Shortly after High School, Frank found a job at Dave Steel Company, his first assignment being stock and tool room keeper. Soon he was promoted to shop worker and steel-layout man. After this came a position in the drafting room. During those days, playing pranks was commonplace. Seldom was a burning cigarette butt dropped on the ground when there was someone's pocket or pants cuff to drop it into. Safety was almost an unknown word there. Safety glasses were passed out to the shop workers when the insurance inspector was due to show up. One day the shop superintendent appointed a shop safety committee, to which Frank was elected chairman. The weight of responsibility of this exalted office didn't bear very heavily on him, however, because when temptation hit him, after leaving the meeting, he yielded. There on the ground was a smoldering cigarette butt, and nearby was a fellow worker facing the other way, cutting steel bars. So into the fellow's back pocket went the butt, and Frank went on his way. There was a gentle wind blowing which fanned the smoldering overalls, and another fellow passing along informed the worker that his pants were on fire. So much for the first act of the newly elected safety chairman.

Based upon Frank's record at Dave Steel, I was given a part-time job there, and after High School graduation, a full-time job in the stock and tool room where he had started. The experience there was beneficial to both of us on every subsequent job. After mother passed away in 1937, Frank and his wife, Mary, let me room and board with them. Mary was working full-time at the Enka rayon plant, but she managed to serve good meals, even so. Two items from her kitchen that were tops with Frank and me were her thick cornbread, and her banana pudding. After WWII started, he moved the family to southern California, where our older brother and I were living, and took a drafting job at Western Steel Company. He had been rejected from military service because of a heart problem, a handicap that I and many others didn't know of until after his death. The job there proved to be a giant step toward his start of business later. His boss assigned him the responsibility of designing arid developing an automatic position-welding machine for ship sections. This experience established him in the hydraulic-equipment design business, in which he excelled and which became his life work. Frank's work during the war was all defense related, in California as well as at Dave Steel.

Frank was never a robust character, yet I saw him shoulder a 200-lb. acetylene tank - a feat which most men heavier than he could not do. One Saturday he and I decided to ride bicycles to the top of Mount Mitchell. The route lay 16 miles along the highway, past Black Mountain, then about an 18-mile climb to the peak. Needless to say, a few miles into the climb we were getting tired, so that when a couple of our friends came along heading for the top on motorcycles, we accepted their offer to ride on their luggage racks. This was the mistake of the century. We didn't realize that the old logging road was rough as a cob, and the guys were afraid they would overheat the engines if they drove slowly. The ride on those rocks was torture, and I'm sure Frank and I lost at least an inch in height from that episode.

While we were at Dave Steel, we had a hand in the fabrication of the steel in many buildings in Asheville. The Haywood St. Bon Marche building has a 36" I-beam across the entrance supported at each end by a stout pipe column. In one of these columns there is a 1915-penny, placed there by Frank before the end plates were welded on. That date is his birth year. The city auditorium structure also came from our shop. Frank did much of the drafting on this job. During erection of the steel, he bought overalls so he could climb around the structure and walk on the beams a hundred feet above the basement floor. Yes, he had "high-walking legs".

When he was working at Western Steel, I was at Douglas Aircraft Co. in Santa Monica, and our older brother was a navigation instructor in the Air Corp. While there, Bellinger dreamed up a navigation device, which promised to out perform anything then available. He discussed the design with the CO of the Air Base, and asked to go to California to get an assessment of the idea from his two "mechanical" brothers there. The CO agreed and put him on a plane to LA. Frank and I discussed the idea with him, and told him it appeared to be a 'winner'. Next Bellinger was sent to Honeywell in Minneapolis, where he was told by their Chief Engineer that the idea was good and workable, but the unit would require gyros superior to any then available. So, it was ahead of its time. (Oddly enough, I was involved at Bell Telephone Lab. in the '60s with the development and manufacture of a similar navigational unit known as a stable platform, which was used and performed remarkably well in our country’s first anti-ICBM missiles.)

Years after leaving Western Steel, Frank passed by that plant on a business trip. It was a Sunday but he stopped, thinking there might be someone on duty that he had worked with. A watchman he knew asked him in and took him through the shop. To his surprise, the position-welding machine he had designed many years before was still in use, and was working on some giant columns. Inquiring, he learned that the huge columns were destined to support the 100-story World Trade towers in New York City, 3000 miles away.

Frank and Mary had returned to Asheville at the recommendation of the allergy specialist who had worked with Frank Jr. Back at Dave Steel, he designed and developed a 200-ton hydraulic press for the plant, then began a hydraulic-equipment business of his own. His superior press designs eventually became the standard for the tobacco industry, and brought customers from around the world. He designed equipment that enabled the use of bales instead of hogsheads, for the storing of tobacco, saving the industry hundreds of millions of dollars. Although he had no formal engineering training, his equipment designs were superb. In business he operated almost a "one man show", or so it appeared to me. Mary was a great help to him, both in matters legal as well as financial. How she put up with him, however, I don't understand, because he could have a very critical tongue, even with others present. Mary told my wife, Virginia, however, that Frank always at night told her that he loved her.

Frank had a "never give up" spirit, like I've seldom seen. In the early days of his long-cylinder tobacco packers, I worked with him on the first installation of a pair in a Danville, VA plant. In order to install his presses, the entire handling system of the plant had to be rebuilt, with the old presses being removed. The installation was completed just as the first tobacco of the season began pouring into the plant by truck. After a few hogsheads had been packed, the piston rings in the cylinders began to break-up, freezing the pistons in the cylinders, and all packing stopped. This meant the entire plant was shut down. I would have lost my mind, realizing what a spot this put us in, but Frank told the plant manager we'd just have to pull the cylinders and replace them - maybe 10 days. (While the tobacco purchased and scheduled to be packed would just have to pile-up, somewhere.) But following this setback were many, many successful one-stroke packers around the world.

So much for a few happenings in a busy life. Frank was not active in "church work", perhaps because he had been quite disappointed in some church goers he had known. He had professed to accept Christ as his savior as a teenager, but his life work (as it appeared to an outsider) was his business. He had an influence on my life in many ways, for which I am thankful.

Charles C. Fishburne, Sr., P. E.
January, 2000